Editor's Note: Thousands of Nova Scotians face daily challenges keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table, let alone living a safe and rewarding life.

Today 500 volunteers fan out across the city for a day of action, part of a campaign by United Way, supported by Halifax Regional Municipality, to develop and implement a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. In the coming months, we'll be watching how they do and bringing you stories of people, their struggles and solutions, large and small.

Mid-afternoon on a frigid Monday. Which means that the inside of the Dartmouth North Community Centre buzzes with people, chatter, action.

In the hallway, an infant taking her first shaky steps passes a member of the buddy program — meant to raise the self-esteem of 5-12-year-olds and teach them the way of the world on a wide range of issues — who has just grabbed an apple from a bowl that’s left out as part of the centre’s healthy snacks initiative.

Inside the local library branch, folks of all ages are checking for on-reserve books.

A few metres away, on the gymnasium floor, teenage boys shoot hoops.

In another nearby room, the junior leaders of the centre’s Take Action Society prepare to mount an anti-bullying play for youngsters.

“It gives me something to do,” Coady Swanson, 15, one of the junior leaders, says of the centre’s variety of after-school programs. “I like to try and make my community better.”

Much of his community, Dartmouth North, is hard-scrabble and low-income. It has a reputation, among people who don’t live there, of having its share of crime.

Which, indirectly, is where the centre and its after-school programs come in.

Studies abound showing that children living in poverty have fewer resources and supports and therefore poorer educational outcomes than their wealthier counterparts.

But hybrid organizations like this one in the north end of Dartmouth help provide what Karen Dahl, manager of program development for Halifax City Libraries, calls “alternative learning places” where kid’s narratives can change.

Here, for example, young people learn practical things like how to cook a healthy meal and, during the summer when the local community garden is up and running, how to grow the kinds of fresh fruits and vegetables that go into those meals.

Through the tutoring club they learn not just how to do math and conjugate a verb, but also the study skills that will help them get through high school and perhaps college and university later on.

Some of the things they learn are less tangible, but could make just as great a difference in their lives.

“There are not a lot of male role models in our community,” says Roseanna Cleveland, CEO of the Take Action Society, founded in 2009 to improve the future of neighbourhood children, which provides daily after-school activities for 30-40 youths.

That was certainly the way for Khaylis Sparks, who grew up with his mother and baby brother in a building across from the community centre.

Now, at 20, his plan is to earn enough to go to university. For now, though, he’s a fixture at the community centre where he helps out with the after-school recreation program, coaches basketball and mentors kids like Swanson.

“It is great to have people from this community working in this community to build up this community,” says Sparks, who has been coming to the after-school program at the centre since he was 14 years old.

Back then he was, by his own admission, an angry kid who didn’t think much of himself. But in time that changed. Coming to the centre, where he became part of a breakdancing program, allowed him to “do different things and meet different people.”

“It changed my thought process,” says Sparks, who dreams of some day owning his own gaming company.

Swanson, who is in Grade 9 and has five siblings, has no idea what the future holds. He just knows that he gets a kick out of being a volunteer youth leader, just as he likes coming to the centre on Thursday nights to help make the meal that the centre serves the following day.

He even likes, as his confidence grows, how his basketball game is improving.

“I used to be scared to go in close to the basket,” he says. “Now I don’t really care, I just go up.”